Sixty teams traveled to Columbia over the weekend to compete in the 9th annual US Quidditch Cup, which was held in South Carolina for the third consecutive year. The two-day tournament featured teams from Miami to British Columbia, and pretty much everywhere in between.
Quidditch is known for its roots from J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series, but many players feel that people don't fully understand the sport's intensity when they mention that they play quidditch.
"It's a good mixture of basketball and soccer," Riley Andrews of the University of Kansas said. "You have a lot of the running involved that soccer has, and basketball is more of the strategy. So you kind of mix those two and you get quidditch."
"It's full contact, co-ed, no padding," Appalachian State's Jackie Ross added.
Each team is required to have at least two players of each gender on the pitch at all time, and the teams field six players at the start of each match. After 18 minutes of game time, the snitch is released, and each team releases a seeker to attempt to catch the snitch, which gives their team 30 points and ends the game. During gameplay, each team has three chasers, who score goals (worth 10 points each), two beaters, who throw dodgeballs at other players to force them to retreat to their hoops and one keeper, who guards their own hoops and can also act as a chaser and score goals, in addition to the seeker when the snitch is released. Because of the 10 point goals that occur with decent regularity, the snitch catch does not carry the weight it does in Rowling's books, where it is worth 150 points.
Two types of teams were represented at the tournament: college club teams and community teams. College teams are fielded by schools such as the University of South Carolina, whose team did not qualify for the cup this season, while community teams are made up of players from multiple schools or players who have graduated college. This year, it was Quidditch Club Boston, a community team from Massachusetts, who reigned supreme on top of the quidditch world, winning the championship 140-130 in overtime over Rochester United, a community team from the Northeast region.